Tech companies commit to fighting harmful AI sexual imagery by curbing nudity from datasets

Several leading artificial intelligence companies pledged Thursday to remove nude images from the data sources they use to train their AI products, and committed to other safeguards to curb the spread of harmful sexual deepfake imagery

WASHINGTON — Several leading artificial intelligence companies pledged Thursday to remove nude images from the data sources they use to train their AI products, and committed to other safeguards to curb the spread of harmful sexual deepfake imagery.

In a deal brokered by the Biden administration, tech companies Adobe, Anthropic, Cohere, Microsoft and OpenAI said they would voluntarily commit to removing nude images from AI training datasets “when appropriate and depending on the purpose of the model.”

The White House announcement was part of a broader campaign against image-based sexual abuse of children as well as the creation of intimate AI deepfake images of adults without their consent.

Such images have “skyrocketed, disproportionately targeting women, children, and LGBTQI+ people, and emerging as one of the fastest growing harmful uses of AI to date,” said a statement from the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Joining the tech companies for part of the pledge was Common Crawl, a repository of data constantly trawled from the open internet that’s a key source used to train AI chatbots and image-generators. It committed more broadly to responsibly sourcing its datasets and safeguarding them from image-based sexual abuse.

In a separate pledge Thursday, another group of companies — among them Bumble, Discord, Match Group, Meta, Microsoft and TikTok — announced a set of voluntary principles to prevent image-based sexual abuse. The announcements were tied to the 30th anniversary of the Violence Against Women Act.